Probably Biased

So a couple of weeks ago I was meandering through Barnes and Noble with little real idea of what to look at or get, I was just kind of killing time one lazy afternoon while out of state visiting family. Eventually I found myself in the Sci-Fi aisle staring at the Star Wars section now dominated by orange bars on almost all the titles saying "Legacy," which indicates that those are the old extended universe books that are no longer canon after the Disney takeover. Only a handful of titles lacked the bar and as I flipped through some I stumbled on Star Wars: Dark Disciple and on the cover were Quinlan Voss and Asajj Ventress. When the Clone Wars show was cancelled I remember a few interviews where the production team talked about some of the unfinished arcs dealing with Darth Maul and Asajj Ventress being covered in either graphic novel or novel form so I had kind of been expecting this book but I had also not been looking out for it or avidly following news. I just sort of kne...

A few days ago I stumbled on a promotion to download the game Jotun for free. Produced by Thunder Lotus Games and released in 2015 this game normally retails for about fifteen bucks. When I downloaded the game it was really only because it was free. Thunder Lotus Games only has two titles on Steam and the trailers and photos looked interesting but I did not really intend to play this game any time soon. However I found myself with some free time and nothing else to do so I fired Jotun up and checked it out. Boy was it worth it. For an inexpensive indy game Jotun is striking. The artwork, the narration and story, the level design, it all leaps out and grabs you in a way that few other games I have played have ever accomplished. Richly narrated in icelandic and translated through subtitles the story follows a viking woman named Thora as she is killed in a shipwreck and then taken to the void by the gods and given a second chance to earn her place in Valhalla, the glorious afterlife in ...

I think everyone who has ever come near a game store knows about mech dominated franchises like Armored Core and Titanfall. What is often overlooked however is that mechs are a common sight in sci-fi games even when they do not take center stage as the key technology or weapons platform of the universe. From Gears of War to Halo rocking stomping killer mechs are a common sights on the battlefields of distant futures, dystopian alternate histories and galaxies far far away. The mechs on this list are featured in game universes that do not revolve around the technology but where they are just one of a number of equal weapons technologies with no special emphasis or importance placed on them as a technology. Despite not being the poster weapon or mechanic of these series the mechs on this list nevertheless stand out as awesome and memorable components of these games.  10: Mech - Osiris New Dawn Looks cool right? Several times I have come close to buying this game just for this...

Currently the most recent entry in Black Library's popular Primarchs series the novel Perturabo: Hammer of Olympia covers the exploits of the Iron Warriors against the mysterious Hrud xenos during the latter days of the Great Crusade. Outnumbered, outgunned, crippled by lack of supply and the horrific time warping abilities of the Hrud the IV Legion has lost a fifth of it's total strength and successfully captured a handful of alien held worlds. To call the campaign a disaster would be an understatement of epic proportions but the pride and ego of Perturabo allows for no retreat. To make matters worse news arrives of treachery on the legion homeworld Olympia and Perturabo is driven home in a rage with disastrous results certain to come. Like the events of a number of the other Primarchs series books Perturabo: Hammer of Olympia largely covers events that are already well known. For many years we have known from small blurbs and excerpts from various editions of the Chaos Spac...

I remember years ago when I first heard of the Izzy Skenazy subway incident on Penn and Teller's show "Bull Shit" my first thought was utter bemusement. At nine years old Izzy was hardly an incapable child and it struck me then that most kids around that age should have the capability to find their way home via public transit systems. Yet as time has progressed it seems that children are only losing habitat, not gaining it. While we are all concerned about the shrinking territories of wild animals we seem oblivious to the almost extinct roaming territory of children. Looking around my neighborhood these days I see precious few kids of any age out and about despite a growing population of young families moving into the area. Those children and teens I do see are invariably accompanied closely by chaperones. I cannot even remember the last time I saw a teenager do anything more significant than walking home from the bus stop unsupervised. Had someone told the fourteen ...

It is probably accurate to say that many, if not most, people likely feel a sense of sadness when it rains. There is just something somber and slightly depressing about the rain that makes it such a powerful visual and auditory cue in film. Certainly I still remember the powerful imagery of the ending of Blade Runner and the monologue: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die." Despite this common theme of rain being associated with sadness and gloom I have always enjoyed the rain. I find it relaxing and calming. I am not sure why I feel so different about rain to most people I know. Few things make me as instantly happy as when I walk outside into a rainy day. The way the sun is slightly muted and beams of light break through the clouds, the drumming rap-tapping of the drops ...

In a recent Huffington Post article the author discusses a number of recent publications about evolutionary psychologists who argue that depression may well serve an evolutionary problem solving purpose. At the core of this theory is the concept that rumination, the deep periods of thought experienced during depression, act as a way of gathering thoughts, learning from mistakes and identifying the source of the psychological pain and working through it. Therefore cognitive behavioral and problem solving therapies may simply accelerate a natural process to bring about an end to a depressive episode. In short, if these theories are correct, people become depressed for a reason and the depression is our body's way of trying to help us solve the cause of the emotional and/or psychological wound. Which is all well and good but, having found myself thrown into a depressive episode of my own in the last couple of weeks, knowing these feelings may be an evolutionary mechanism for pr...

Without a definitive plan for my life the idea of setting my own hours and making a little money on the side sounded like a great idea, I just did not have a vehicle new enough to qualify for being a rideshare driver. So I ignored it, until recently when I did get a new-ish car that was new enough to qualify and my excuses for not trying out a rideshare disappeared. So a couple weeks ago I got off of my butt and signed up with Uber. After putting in all my documentation, setting up commercial insurance on my car (just in case!), getting some useful additional stuff like a multi-device USB phone charger and a dashcam (partly for my own peace of mind) I was ready to drive for Uber. Or was I? Day after day I had some documentation issue, particularly with my profile picture. What should have been laughably simple to take and upload with Uber's own application proved much more irritating. In frustration I took a very mediocre picture with my phone's camera outside the uber app...

This is something I wrote back in 2013 but never published, while old it remains as relevant today as it did then.  Violent attack dogs, vicious killers, a danger to society, this is the modern perception of a trio of breeds collectively known as Pit Bulls. The American Pit Bull Terrier, the American Staffordshire Terrier and the Staffordshire Bull Terrier are the three breeds of dog generally referred to as Pit Bulls, however the term can cover a wide variety of mutts and mixed breed dogs that simply share a similarity of appearance with these breeds. Many myths surround the breed, uncontrolled aggression, locking jaws, they have more bite pressure per square inch than other breeds, they don't feel pain, their brains swell and cause them to go crazy, they can randomly turn on their owners, they are only good for dog fighting, if they are aggressive towards dogs they will be aggressive towards people, the list goes on and on. These myths have sprung up in the last few decades ...

Hindsight is 20/20 is one of the more painful truths of life, we really only know what to do, when, where and how, after it has all happened. This could not be more true of my college experience. I entered college with rose-colored glasses on, naive and hopeful I bought into the image of college as advertised in popular culture: the place where you learn new things, meet different people, try out various options and ultimately work towards picking a career path. Unfortunately college no longer lives up to that reputation, if it ever did. Studies and surveys have started to show a growing epidemic of young adults "failing to launch." Children who drop out or graduate college and move back in with their parents, many failing to enter the workforce or even when they do failing to attain a career in the field of their degree. I have read a number of articles on the subject that have postulated a number of causes of this phenomenon and presented some ideas at solutions. For my p...